As Uber cuts jobs, it is targeting some of the smallest teams in its organizational chart.
In a memo announcing layoffs affecting about 10% of staff, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said on Wednesday that the taxi giant would cut management layers and reduce the number of “micro-teams” – those with just one or two direct reports – by almost half.
“The result is a simpler org chart focused on building versus managing,” Khosrowshahi wrote.
Uber’s focus is not only on small groups of employees. They are groups that have their own management layer. The move comes at a time when many tech companies are looking to rebuild organizational charts with fewer layers and more managers acting as “player-coaches,” not just supervisors.
In some cases, this means CEOs like Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg have touted the value of the “small team,” where elite workers do the work that once required legions. Coinbase announced in May that it would have “no pure managers” as it switched to AI-native pods, including “one-man teams” in which a single employee takes on the work of an engineer, designer and product manager.
For others, it means asking fewer middle managers to oversee larger teams – and sometimes taking on more hands-on work.
How AI is reshaping teams
Today, managers can often oversee larger teams as AI changes their operations, says David McJannet, co-founder of Dome Systems, a platform for monitoring AI agents. Instead of turning to a supervisor for every task, workers can use AI for help, he said. Managers can then focus more on setting goals and checking whether employees are on track to achieve them.
“The manager’s job is less about hand-holding,” McJannet said.
However, there can be risks to downsizing leadership ranks – and not just for those in the middle. As managers have more reports and responsibilities, career development and mentorship can fall to the side.
Paddy Lambros, the founder and CEO of Dex, which uses AI to connect software engineers with employers, previously told Business Insider that the intense pace of work has made managers’ relationships with their reports “more tactical and transactional.”
“It’s not about managing the people, it’s about managing the work,” Lambros said. “And it’s a lot more sink or swim.”
Some executives are in favor of a shift to fewer managers overseeing larger teams. Fred Voccola, the chairman and CEO of AI software company Simpro Group, said this transition must happen “faster and more aggressively.”
A Gallup report published in January found that the average manager’s span of control has grown from 10.9 direct reports in 2024 to 12.1 in 2025. At Simpro, Voccola says, the ratio of individual contributors to managers has increased from about eight to one to 17 to one as AI helps employees produce more.
The model requires leaders to contribute directly to tasks, Voccola said. He calls it ‘dirty’ work for managers. For example, he said he wants to involve a Chief Technology Officer in debates about software architecture and a Chief Marketing Officer to write the texts.
That does not mean that every small team within companies is redundant. In his memo, Uber’s Khosrowshahi said the company would reduce the number of microteams, not eliminate them entirely.
Kevin Kelley, global organizational design leader at Boston Consulting Group, said there are cases where small teams are the right choice. For example, new initiatives can start with just a few people. He said small teams can also make sense when the work is highly uncertain or highly interdependent and requires senior expertise.
“A small team is going to make sense under these circumstances for a period of time,” Kelley said.
Microteams are under a lot of pressure
For some executives, reducing the number of teams with just a few direct reports isn’t just about cutting layers or costs. Bill George, former CEO of medical device maker Medtronic, said such teams can lack the “diversity of expertise” to solve problems independently simply because of their size.
“We need a multidisciplinary team,” says George, an executive fellow at Harvard Business School. “The problem with a team of one or two people is that you only get a few disciplines.”
George expects more and more companies to have managers overseeing 15 to 50 people, although there is no magic number for the right span of control, he said.
One purpose of banning managers is to reduce the layers that separate leadership from frontline employees — a point Khosrowshahi made in his memo, when he said Wednesday’s restructuring would reduce the number of employees seven or more layers removed from the CEO by 20%.
That can give executives a more direct view of what’s happening, George said, rather than relying on information filtered through different levels of management. That was his approach when he led Medtronic. If the company had production problems, he said, he didn’t want to hear about it just from the quality department.
“I go to the floor and talk to the people on the production line,” George said. “They’ll tell me the real story.”
